WORKING SAIL
for Oriental products , and as committee boat and floating home for Commodore York in the various waterborne events he organizes. Her provenance is unclear, save that she was built in all probability to carry cargo, perhaps as early as the 1850s. She is built of teak, and sails well on her nearly flat bottom, taking the vagaries of her long career in stride. Mary E. was built in Bath, Maine, as a fishing smack, in 1906, and is today the last survivor of some 4,000 wooden sailing ships built in that center of the art. For the first thirty-eight years of her life she worked as fishing smack, freight carrier, and passenger and mail boat in Block Island Sound. In 1944 she was converted to a motorized dragger. Sunk in a hurricane in 1963, she was completely rebuilt, certified by the U.S. Coast Guard, and entered into the passenger charter service, sailing out of Camden, Maine. She is now owned by the Seven Seas Sailing Club, led by the redoubtable Captain Teddy Charles who has taken her up and down the coast, including a stint as youth training ship in New Jersey. This summer, she will sail from the National Society's Brooklyn pier, taking visitors out on the water. Tehani is an Alden schooner, like Trade Wind, but at 38 feet much smaller. She was built in Nova Scotia in 1939. Her owner, Commander Icarus Pyros of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at King's Point, Long Island, has entered her in the South Street Mu-
seum's Schooner Race for the Mayor's Cup since 1973. Sailing regularly with six midshipmen in crew, she is the only one of the Sea Day ships that works to train young people for careers at sea. The ocean-racing yawl Petrel designed by Olin Stephens is of the elegant windward-going type that won races in the 30s and 40s, as the Alden schooners had won them in the 20s. Today she takes people out on sailing tours from Battery Park under the aegis of Bring Sailing Back. The Black Pearl Romping with a fair wind in the photograph that leads off this report, Black Pearl expresses much that people look for in sailing. And she is sailed in a manner that expresses even more. Her owner, Barclay H . Warburton, III, is President of the American Sail Training Association, and deeply interested in history. He brought his little half-brig again and again to New York to support the work of the struggling South Street Museum. She looked at home in the old Street of Ships, as she should, on a waterfront once crowded with vessels of her type. Only slowly, as the nineteenth century wore on, were the square-rigged brigs and half-brigs replaced by schooners, which demanded less of their crews. Many were no bigger than the 51-foot Pearl, though 65 to 90 feet was a more usual range of size. Built with a hefty beam and draft, like her cargo-carrying predecessors, she sets 2, 100 square feet
of canvas in a towering rig, with a mainmast five feet longer than the ship. C. Lincoln Vaughan built her at his yard in Wickford, Rhode Island, launching her in 1948. He had thoughts of sailing her round the world, and felt the half brig (or hermaphrodite brig), square-rigged on the foremast, foreandaft on the main, to be the ideal rig for that kind of sailing. But he sailed her only from Long Island Sound to Maine waters, until he sold her to Barclay Warburton in 1959. Warburton sailed her further afield, from Nova Scotia to the West Indies. And in 1962, he began training young people aboard her. She took part in Operation Sail in 1964, and in 1972 Warburton took her to Europe to take part in the international sail training race from Cowes to the Skaw. After wintering in France, she was sailed home by Barclay's son Tim. Barclay Warburton, in the meantime, had set about organizing the American Sail Training Association, upon the invitation of the international Sail Training Association headquartered in London. Black Pearl will be the flagship of the flotilla that sails the Brooklyn waterfront on Sea Day Weekend. She is a familiar sight by now to people on both shores of the East River; many plans have been discussed upon her decks, many Yorkers have sailed in her. She goes on from this port to an active summer in the American Sail Training Association program, reported elsewhere in this issue . .t